On 8 February 1904 the viceroy’s chief of staff in Port Arthur was comforted to read in a telegram received at 2300 from St Petersburg that, since negotiations with the Japanese were progressing well, ‘any fear of armed conflict is mere fancy’. In the harbour a group of officers had decided to invite some ladies back to their ship, fully illuminated like all the Russian warships, but on the way their boat was nearly run down by a slow-moving destroyer. Someone in the boat jokingly said that it was the Japanese monkeys come to attack them. Suddenly, three torpedoes exploded on the hulls of Russian ships, and firing broke out on all sides. The Japanese had put in a surprise torpedo attack with ten destroyers.
They had fitted the heads of their Whiteheads with scissor-type cutters as the Russians were known to protect their ships with nets. Even so, only three of the torpedoes hit their targets, and many others could be seen caught in the nets, their propellers whipping the water into foam. The French-built battleship Tsesarevich was torpedoed amidships, the American-built Retvizan was hit in the stern, and the protected cruiser Pallada also was hit, on the port side amidships. She suffered a fire in a coal bunker, but was not seriously damaged. The three ships were soon repaired and returned to service.
The results of the attack were militarily disappointing, and many observers felt the torpedo to be an overrated weapon, of potential for the future but not for the present. The failure of net cutters to overcome these obstacles was deceptively encouraging. The battleship Sevastopol was subsequently moored in the outer reaches of the harbour surrounded by double nets, and survived repeated torpedo attacks. The resistance of Pallada, protected by her coal bunker, led designers to put too much reliance on this method of anti-torpedo protection, instead of conducting meaningful tests of the growing explosive power of modern torpedoes, and paying more attention to proper internal subdivision.
Subsequent losses during the siege of Port Arthur were caused by the mine, both sides suffering grievously, up until the survivors of the blockaded Russian fleet were sunk by Japanese army howitzers.
The lessons to be drawn from the Battle of Tsushima, when the Russian Baltic squadron under Zinovy Petrovich Rozhestvensky was annihilated by Togo’s ships, were carefully examined by naval officers and designers worldwide. It was generally agreed that the Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats, although participating in the final sinking of the Kniaz Suvorov and other cripples, had failed to live up to the promise expected of them. Two comments seemed pertinent: first, the Japanese had launched from too great a range, because they needed to husband their resources, lost destroyers not being easily replaced; and second, launching at long range and therefore slow speed meant that too many torpedoes missed their targets.
CHAPTER 21
The Great War
U-BOAT SUCCESSES EARLY IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Käpitanleutnant Otto Eduard Weddigen was a competent and daring submarine commander, every bit the equal of his Royal Navy counterparts. Unlike them, he was offered far more targets by the large Royal Navy, but he was also aided by the disparaging attitude of British naval commanders towards the potential of the submarine. When in October 1900 the British Admiralty had reluctantly ordered the first five submarine boats — the Hollands — Rear Admiral Wilson, Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy, who had won his VC on land during the Sudan campaign, famously declared the submarine a ‘damned un-English weapon’. Wilson was no Luddite — indeed he was one of the Navy’s leading torpedo experts and went on to support the development of the British submarine — but at the time he was expressing a reservation felt by many naval officers, and not just in the Royal Navy.
Despite this unpromising start, in March 1904 the five early Royal Navy Holland boats, assigned to the defence of Portsmouth in the naval manoeuvres, had ‘torpedoed’ four battleships of the Channel Fleet, including the flagship. Unfortunately, this theoretical success was marred in succeeding years by the loss of the larger A 1 through collision with SS Berwick Castle, the swamping of A 4 by a passing ship, a fatal explosion on A 5 and the loss of A 7 in heavy seas in January 1914. Such disasters helped confirm the Admiralty in the belief that the submarine did not pose a significant threat to their command of the sea.
The German submarine service was even slower off the mark, having to overcome Tirpitz’s aversion to such craft — the first U-boat was not launched until 1906 — but once at war these primitive warships were quick to prove their worth. This occurred in dramatic manner. One month into the Great War, on 6 September 1914 off St Abbs Head, Käpitanleutnant Hersing in the diesel-powered U 21 sighted the light cruiser HMS Pathfinder cruising slowly at some 5 knots to economise on her limited reserves of coal. Hersing fired one torpedo, which was spotted by a lookout on Pathfinder. Her captain ordered evasive action but to no avaiclass="underline" the torpedo struck under the bridge and caused the explosion of the forward magazine. Divers report that all the ship forward of the first funnel vanished in the explosion. Pathfinder sank in less than five minutes, with the loss of 250 men, just eighteen surviving. Pathfinder was the very first ship to be sunk by a locomotive torpedo fired from a submarine. We will meet with Käpitanleutnant Hersing and U 21 again in the next section.
It was not just the British who were blind to the potential of the submarine. Three days after the loss of the Pathfinder, the German light cruiser Hela was torpedoed by the British E 9.
Much worse was to follow a fortnight later. On 22 September, Otto Weddigen was in command of U 9, one of the older submarines, commissioned in April 1910 and powered by unreliable Körting paraffin engines which emitted vast clouds of white exhaust smoke when running on the surface. He was patrolling the Broad Fourteens, in the southern North Sea, when his first officer, Spiess, spotted the masts of a ship and smoke. Weddigen ordered U 9 to dive. His targets, which he first took to be four-funnelled light cruisers of the Birmingham class, turned out to be three obsolescent armoured cruisers of the Cressy class, the name-ship and her two sisters Aboukir and Hogue. Built at the turn of the century, they displaced 12,000 tons, and carried a crew of 760 men at a top speed, when new, of up to 21 knots. By September 1914 they were well past their best, and the fact that they were manned largely by raw reservists led them to be referred to as the ‘Live Bait Squadron’.
Although the Royal Navy was large, it still needed to press into service every available ship, and these old and vulnerable vessels were performing an important function, screening transports carrying vital troop reinforcements to France. On paper, their heavy armament of two 9.2in and twelve 6in guns, protected by an armour belt up to 6in thick, should have stood them in good stead in a surface action against anything less potent than a battleship. They were, however, left fatally exposed with no destroyer screen, which had withdrawn because of bad weather.